New programme books for contemporary operas

I have recently received the programme books for the three following performances :

- Jake Heggie : Three Decembers, Milwaukee (Florentine Opera), March 11, 2016 ;
- Bright Sheng : Dream of the Red Chamber, San Franciso, September 10, 2016 ;
- Oscar Strasnoy : Comeback, Berlin (Staatsoper im Schiller Theater), September 30, 2016.

The first one is a 30 pages brochure. It contains :

- complete cast and crew ;
- synopsis ;
- About the Composer ;
- William Florescu : Director's Note ;
- biography of the librettist Gene Scheer ;
- biography of the stage director William Florescu ;
- biography of the conductor Joseph Rescigno ;
- artist biographies, all with color headshots.

The second is a 86 pages magazine. It contains :

- Ken Smith : Dreamweavers - An all-star creative team transports an epic Chinese novel to the operatic stage ;
- Synopsis, personnel, orchestra setting and family tree ;
- complete cast and crew ;
- Ann Waltner : Red Chamber Refelctions ;
- Stephen Roddy : Delving Deeper into 'Dream of the Red Chamber' ;
- Artist profiles with balck and white headshots.

The last one is a poster folded into a 16 pages leaflet. It contains :

- complete cast ;
- biography of Emil Jannings, a character of the opera and first winner of the Academy Award for Best Actor ;
- biography of Tilla Durieux, another character of the opera, an Austrian actress ;
- Roman Reeger : Eben war ich noch der Mittelpunkt und jetzt ?

This programme is entirely in German. The scanned covers of all programme books for contemporary operas I have in my collection can be viewed in this flickr folder.

Received in the mail this morning : 'Elmer Gantry' (Aldridge) and 'Wuthering Heights' (Floyd) from Milwaukee

This Wednesday morning, I have received two program books published by Florentine Opera in Milwaukee for the following operas :

- Robert Aldridge : Elmer Gantry, first performance on March 13th, 2015 ;
- Carlisle Floyd : Wuthering Heights, first performance on January 9th, 2015.

Program books are 50 and 38 pages brochures.

The first contains :

- Revival - Elmer Gantry returns ! by Leann Davis Alspaugh ;
- The Bully Pulpit - Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry, by Leann Davis Alspaugh ;
- the complete cast ;
- the detailed synopsis ;
- detailed biographies of the composer, the librettist Herschel Garfein, the director Frank Kelley and the conductor Christopher Larkin ;
- biographies of the singers (all biographies with headshots).

This opera was already performed there in March 2010 and a recording has been released by Naxos in its American Opera Classics collection :

The second contains :

- the complete cast ;
- synopsis ;
- detailed biographies of the composer, the conductor Joseph Mechavich ;
- biographies of the singers (all biographies with headshots).

Scanned covers of all program books I have in my collection are in this flickr folder.